The Green Motion Scam

So there is this car rental company called as Green Motion from where I used to rent cars quite frequently. This year alone, I might have used their services 5 to 6 times. All these times, my experience has been quite good until........

 It was the Sunday of Oct 21st 2013 when I went to Green Motion Heathrow London to pick up my car. Lucky me I even got an upgrade from a small car to a Vauxhall Insignia (pssst !!! Its a trap). Unlike the song that Sunil Shetty used to hear in Hera Pheri, I heard none while this happened.

As usual they carried out basic checks on the washed car which was still very soapy and hardly took a couple of minutes to check any dents or scratches on the car at the time of renting it. Everything looked good and we had a great time on Sunday.

I went to return it the next day and the bumper to bumper traffic had already made the Monday morning blues even worse. As I finally arrived at their place to return it, the guy who came to do the final checks hardly checked anything and went directly for the front wind shield and said " This is chipped off, you would have to pay damages".

Upon closely examining it, I could see two small dots on the glass, like two pin pricks. I knew I was being scammed right there but in spite of arguing that I had nothing to do with those, the guy wasn't ready to budge. What made it worse was that the other 4 people from the company ganged up against me. I couldn't even say "F**k off" and leave as they had already taken £300 as deposit  and made me pay £100 for so called "damages". See if you can spot it. It was already 10:30 and I was extremely late for work and had was no mood to argue further. The only response from their side was , "Pay us and go claim with your third party insurance provider"

                                         

I must say that Zenith, the insurance providers were quite helpful and gave me back  70% of the money. But I did some further research into Green Motion and this is what I found.

• There are numerous others who have been scammed in similar ways and it's always either the wind shield or  tyres and rims.
• Green Motion makes its money out of renting out cars for reasonable prices and scamming the customers for 100s of £.
• They specifically target people who do not have a British passport and especially the ones who have a connecting flight to catch in few hours.

My sincere advice to anyone thinking of hiring from Green Motion is

                                      *****PLEASE DO NOT*****

The disgusting bastards don't even show any respect to their customers and have no ethics whatsoever.

A month later, the only thing I'm currently able to do is hurl abuses at the entire family tree of the people who run the company and write this blog post. Sigh !!!

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365 days of life on an island - part 1

If you are caught off guard by time and do not notice the duration of the events happening around you, its time to take a look down the memory lane. People usually refer to this phenomenon as time flying even though I feel it should be referred to as time running. But then again, its me who is saying; who gives a damn? Its been a year so soon and I still remember all those parties just before I left India  even though I was almost knocked out in all of them. This post is dedicated to all those who have been a part of my life over the past 365 days. 

Day 1: In spite of gulping down 3 pegs of Red Label and 2 cans of Carling, I couldn't sleep on the plane and after watching a couple of movies, it was time to land and pass through numerous checks at Terminal 5 in Heathrow. I practically didn't realize that I had passed through immigration even after 3 days. The next scene resembled a movie in which I was running to gate 1 to catch my flight to Glasgow and made it with just under a minute left to close the doors. I sat down still gasping for breath and I heard the pilot saying "This flight has been delayed for an hour due to technical difficulties. Sorry for the inconvenience". Oh crappppppppp. Nevertheless, I finally reached Glasgow and was greeted with rain. Little that I realize that it was a sign of things to come.

Day 5: First day in Strathclyde and attending a class after more than a year. Felt great to see a lot of new faces. Little did I know that there were some unique characters and one very irritating homo sapien in there. I still pity the dude who realized this only recently. 

Day 6: After days and days of house hunting, finally moved into a house and actually a very beautiful house. I was more excited about the KFC and the McD in front of my house than civic amenities.

Day 15: All the emergency supplies had got exhausted and it was time to get down to some real cooking. But wait, it had got late to go to college and had to make a run to the class. Being a person who is always on time, I find it weird to have 100 odd eyes gazing at me as if I was tricked into confessing something like Tom Crusie  makes Jack Nicholson into blurting out the secret in the movie A Few Good Men(1992). However some do it on purpose for grabbing attention and the faking it girl managed to do it everyday to attract the attention of the opposite sex. Well that trick never worked and in the best case, repelled the male species away from her zone of existence.

Day 25: The leaves had started to wither away and the incessant rains had made commuting very discomforting. It literally used to rain everyday and the presence of strong winds not only made the life more difficult but brutally murdered my umbrellas. The deadlines for assignments had started approaching and it was time to slog day and night. Managed to call a few friends and family members that day and exhausted the credit on my calling card.

Day 85: I walked into the kitchen to make some breakfast and when I looked outside, I saw that the weather was very gloomy and it was raining as usual. No wait, there is something unusual about the rain and it looks white. Oh wowwww, it was the first time I had seen a snowfall and was very excited. I ran out out of the house bare footed to have some snow flakes on my tongue. After getting back to my senses, I realized that my feet had gone too cold and had to run back into the house. The next 2 days saw almost everyone posting pics about the first snowfall and it was a beautiful sight in the beginning.

Day 99: Back after a trip to London. Thanks to Mr & Mrs Spoke for the great hospitality and taking us students around in the city that houses murky water Thames. To quote a dialogue from one of my favorites movies, Snatch "Yes London. You know, fish, chips, cup of tea, bad food, worse weather, Mary-fucking-Poppins, London". Well I couldn't find a more apt description of the city even though I could add 1 more adjective, insanely expensive.

Day 102: It was happy new year time and I woke up from a bad hangover from the previous night's new year party. But then again, I didn't have any other better work to do and so went back to sleep to avoid the hangover. Being a person who always tries new remedies for hangover, I realized that sleeping again was not a remedy and instead a big mistake. I have tried everything from coffee, green tea, curd rice, banana milk shake, drinking litres of water, working out to all the desi remedies including a crazy thought of even jerking off (oh boy, it just feels like a bomb exploding in the head, please don't try it). But trust me none of them work and the only way to avoid hangover is "to stay drunk".

A new year calls for a new post. With some of my readers asking me to make my posts shorter, I'm taking their suggestions and ending this here. However, the story is just 1/3rd over and still a long way to go. I will try to complete it before I head back to India next week. Chronicles of the land of Kama Sutra and drunken revelations are some of the posts that you can look out for in the near future.

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